Legacy AM/FM radio adapters and Silicon Labs tuner chips
A grab-bag of AM/FM radio receivers and transmitters that plugged into PCs as ISA cards, USB dongles (such as Griffin's radioSHARK), or embedded I2C tuner chips. It covers Silicon Labs Si470x/Si4713/Si476x parts and the NXP/Philips TEA575x and TEA5764 family, mostly shipped in consumer and embedded gear from the late 1990s through the early 2010s.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as a legacy niche. The hardware is largely discontinued consumer kit and the everyday user base is small, but the code is not abandoned: maintainers were still converting parts like tea575x.c to newer media-core APIs as recently as 2025, kernel documentation still describes the Si470x family as supported, and there is no replacement subsystem that covers the same mix of radio devices. A note about the legacy nature of the hardware would help future cleanup decisions.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
At least part of drivers/media/radio (tea575x.c) still receives upstream maintenance work in 2025 via media-core API conversion patches, so the directory is not abandoned.
- kernel.org
Upstream kernel documentation still documents Si470x radio receivers and supported USB devices, indicating the subsystem remains intentionally supported.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows RADIO_SI470X remains present through current kernel series and maps to multiple USB/I2C devices, supporting continued but niche hardware coverage.
- en.wikipedia.org
One representative USB radio device covered by this directory, Griffin radioSHARK, is discontinued, supporting the conclusion that much of the hardware is legacy rather than current-volume retail hardware.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
`drivers/media/radio` is a real driver directory with many ISA/USB/I2C AM/FM radio drivers plus Silicon Labs tuner/transmitter chips. Recommendation is `keep-annotate`: the hardware base is mostly legacy consumer/embedded radio gear with low 2026 deployment, but not clearly removable because upstream still touches the code and kernel docs/LKDDb still carry active support. `lore_activity` produced the lore URL; `web.search_query` produced the kernel.org, LKDDb, and Wikipedia URLs. `lore_file_timeline` on the directory path returned no matches for the prefix, so I relied on per-file lore activity plus the provided commit statistics. No natural in-tree replacement covers the whole directory's use case.